journal.coffee

The cold morning air has subsided while I have sat here, staring at a blank screen with a blinking cursor. The hills have turned hazy again as the city has come to life after a bout of early rains. The sky is still a bright blue, filled with fluffy white clouds. It does not seem it will rain until the evening now. I have noticed all this and more in the past two hours. Perhaps, three. It is natural to lose track of time when one is procrastinating. And since it will not rain for the foreseeable hours, I have no excuse to not begin writing.

Until a few hours ago, I could still make my case to the council in my mind: I was relishing and embracing the weather. You see, I have waited for monsoon for a long time now, and I am not like other people. It has rained daily for the entirety of last week, and it is all everyone wanted. The sultry summer air has been replaced by a humid waft or a cold shower, with nothing in-between. Now, most people want something else. They want it to stop, but I am not like them, so I sit and watch the rain for as long as it shall last. And therefore, the writing has to wait. With a case strong as this, I would convince my mind that this delay in my writing is justified.

And then, to convince me further, I would think about July. I would talk about how July has arrived. With it, only a single lesson graces the skies outside my window: nothing good comes from interrupting the flow of time. With an argument as strong as this, I could not deny myself this hour of prolonging, of staring at a blank page. Of course, now that the sky is clear, my defence has fallen apart, and I am nothing but a delinquent, wasting time. It is surprising how quickly things change. And as the world around me conspires for me to begin, to let go of this slow dilatoriness, this languid disposition of a slow Saturday morning, now turned into an afternoon as the sun peeks out from behind the clouds, it occurs to me I am out of coffee.

And like a stubborn mule, I sit at my desk, unwavering. There is a certain charm in not doing anything after all. Oh, to be the most prolific of sloths, the most productive of slackers, but on most days, a lethargic fool.

If I was meant to write a hundred good sentences in the entirety of my life, I must write a billion, hoping to stumble to the hundred. To wait for genius was to waste it altogether. There was some of it in all of us. If I sat around waiting, I would wait my entire life. I had to write and keep writing. There is gold in me yet. It only shows up mixed with the rest, but it does show, and that is all we ever want. To not share the gold in you, no matter how little or how much was theft from the world. It was a gross injustice and a blatant crime. With this understanding, I only wish to write; I don’t wish to write the perfect sentence anymore, but god, I wish I knew how to stop trying.

And what if I run out of things to write? Then, I shall write about nothing, for no writer ever writes about anything after all. It is not the subject but the writing that says what is essential. It is pretty easy to talk about the important things; they are important already. Paint me a picture of a pebble, paint it with words and make me fall in love with it. Then, I shall lay down my pen and kneel before you, my life in my hands, ready to serve. To write about nothing in particular and to do it well is the mark of an exceptional writer. And when a friend asks me what I want to become, an advocate for the undiscussed is what comes to mind. Of course, I do not tell them this; I keep it to myself. My telling them who I aspire to be does nothing; my sitting at the desk every morning is what gets me there.

Like love, like all noble things, to chase greatness was to muddy it, to insult it. It was the most vulgar pursuit a person could indulge in, and yet, all writers did it. Despite their bold claims, all writers aspired to be great. Greatness greatly differed for all of them, naturally, for no two people look at a pebble and paint the same picture, but all of us chased it. For me, greatness is my hundred great sentences. If I can manage them, I will have made my mark. It seems to be a simple errand, but it is anything but routine, and yet, this routine churning of words was how you got there. To be a writer was to be a banal being who dreamt of greatness—a living contradiction.

The world demanded complexity because simplicity made it uncomfortable. Things, simple things, like living properly, were impossible to comprehend unless you committed a sort of social treason, refusing to conform to the accepted criteria toward it. As you found your way into greener pastures and flowering fields, they often asked how you arrived there. And when you told them the answer was nothing, they did not understand. They wanted a ten-point guide and a seven-step plan, but there was absolutely nothing to it. The fact that the answer was as simple as stopping to look around now and then did not sit well. The machinations and forced intricacies of the modern age make it impossible for simple things to exist, yet they do exist. Some of us keep them alive.

There is little else I can think of as I have finally started to breathe after spending months building a life as simple as I can at the moment. Perhaps, one would say, I have become complacent, but for what? I do not yet know. For most of my life, I have chased myself; I could always see myself—a better myself—walking ahead. I would always run behind it, and I would always stumble and fall short. In many ways, I have always wanted to become who I knew I could be, and I have reached a semblance of it in more than one way. I don’t know if this is a temporary respite from a lifelong chase, but for the first time in my life, I am not running. I hope these days are not numbered. All the surety I demanded from others, I was only meant to find. All this grief I now understand so well, I was only supposed to leave behind.

And so when someone asks me how I got here, and I tell them I arrived when I stopped running, they think it to be a riddle or some sort of jest, but it is the only truth I know. Until we stop running to catch our breath, or altogether, we cannot see where we are. Most happiness is passed in a blur when we zoom past everything; most life, too.

Never before was I so happy, continually happy till July. It has been a blank space to rest in between battles for most years. July, for me, has always been a ceasefire. I have rested with bouts of drinks in the sun, brunches, lunches, and laughter. In the rainy envelope of the month when nothing happens, over the city where nothing ever happens, I have spent the past few days preparing for what is to come. Naturally, it is beyond me to predict whatever comes next, but something eventually arrives, and that is life. We must always look forward to things changing because they do so without our say-so, even if we don’t want them to, especially then.

I spent a good chunk of last evening doing nothing, revelling in my inaction. I sat with the doors to my balcony and my heart open alike. The flat seemed to have been cut off by a sheath of falling water. No sound from outside could interrupt my moment of languor, for there was no sound at all. There was just the drops tapping; it seemed to have taken over everything else. There is nothing more pleasurable than being removed from the world temporarily. When the rain stopped pattering, I walked to the coffee shop. I stopped to look at a bougainvillaea that has now covered the sidewalk. The rain had made its leaves so much greener and the flowers so much prettier.

It has been my secret to happiness. To stop and look at things not in the way of just staring at a tree and calling it beautiful but really looking at it: to look at how its branches intertwine, to look at the leaves and their intricate lines, to look at the flowers, all of their parts. Looking at the detail is a gift; not using it is a sin.

While sipping my coffee, I overheard some people talking about how little of it we should drink. I nodded softly in agreement; then, I took another sip with the misplaced guilt of a thief. In my lethargy, I put my head down on the table, losing myself in the music. I got up, paid for the coffee, and left a minute later. Just then, it began to rain.

As I stood to wait for the cab, I realised I was not worried about getting drenched. Worry was the least of my worries. It was still July, after all, and in July, we rest.

I often only dream of the world I am in, but there are changes, little aberrations from what I know, a street placed in a slightly different way, a building that should not exist, a stream of water where there is none. It baffles me how these places have stayed the same over the years. That is to say, if I were to dream about the home I grew up in again, I would also dream of a canal-like stream about five hundred metres from it. There is no stream. But my mind remembers what it dreamt first.

There are countless buildings—their details saved from when they were first conjured, and streets—streets I know like the back of my hand but have never truly seen because they do not exist. But who is to tell me this world, this living, breathing world in my head, is not real? There are places I have never been to nor seen, but they do exist. I remember them. Quite regularly, when simply lost in thought, I remember things rather vividly, almost like how we recall a day from long ago. Then it occurs to me: this lucid memory is a lie. When I stress to think about where I saw the building or what the day was like, I realise it was a dream.

In moments like those, where I can almost picture something enough to draw it, I question everything I know to be real. The other day, I thought of a beautiful Prussian blue building, down to the last step on each staircase. I sat trying to remember when I first visited it, for it was as normal as recalling any other, but there was no memory. And it occurred to me that it has been in a dream all the times I’ve seen it. It does not exist. I have never been to it. I would not know where it was even if it existed in this world.

It is but rumination to even talk about it. These matters are far bigger than me for me to even begin solving them, but it compels me to ask: what is real?

Did this person whose life I dream of have a stream near his home growing up? Does he visit blue buildings or walk on streets leading to an old tenement where he lives? Does he dream of this flat, this desk, of writing these words? Does he faintly recall them, too? I would never know.

For now, the blue skies of early July demand me to go out for coffee.

Life starts unravelling long before we notice it. It is only when we sit down, years from when the first domino fell, the first cut in the tapestry, the first pull of the thread, the first push into a collision course that we see it. When we see it, though, we cannot do much about it but remark on it. That is all there is to it. That is all there is to do with the past. We can remember it, but life must be lived forward. There is barely any cause and effect to life. This intricate web of destiny, this winding maze, only tells us one thing: nothing causes anything, and most that happens, happens for so many reasons at the same time, you might say there is no reason at all. If there is, we cannot be the sole judges of any of it.

But there is one thing we can decide for ourselves: we can continue walking.

Life starts growing like a vine that does not need permission to climb up the pipes, fences, walls and lattices until you see nothing but green all over the house as if it was always there and a verdant paradise of plenty. The human ability to forget should not be underestimated! While sometimes, vines are let loose intentionally and given a hand, in most cases, nature finds a way. Abundance is the only language nature speaks if you allow it time. With time, my life has grown remarkably in ways I did not, could not have imagined when the unravelling first began. And since I started walking, quite like the vine, I have grown forward and forward only to arrive here with happiness in my heart and a sense of peace I cannot put into words.

As I make camp in this little clearing full of green, I realise I have walked incredibly far.

It’s late, but I can hear the clouds rumble. I will wake up to the rain tomorrow, I tell myself as I lay in bed. I will wake to a city muffled by nature, silenced by the Gods, softened by a million kisses from the sky, landing softly, each making its mark, not that we can see it. It is the collective effort we will all see—the result of a stupendously long affair going on for millennia. When the air about the Earth is too heavy, when the Earth is exhausted, the skies shower it with love in plenty. The love is what we know as rain. I think of all this, almost imagining these words written on the page before I sleep. I will wake up to the rain tomorrow. That is reason alone to wake up at all.

And in the morning, I wake up to find a torpor in the air, a sort of tranquil inactivity. It is raining. I go out to the balcony and look at the world. The hills are absent from the landscape. The honking is occasional, most of it muted, and there is nothing but the patter all about. I look at a brave bird still swinging about; the others probably found their way to their nests, or well, the exterior units of air conditioners, tiny holes in buildings and all corners they can fit into. No one finds their way back home if they’re out and about when the rain comes—a temporary respite is enough. I think of this as I watch the bird playing in the rain. I can sense it is playing because it is not flying to and from anywhere. It’s flying about here and there but with no intent to leave. At first, I think it is crazy, but then I realise we are one and the same.

Once it begins to pour, and if you’re still outside, your first bet is to run to shelter. Now, if you’re lucky, you find it, but if it continues pouring, and if you’re without shelter, what better answer is there than to get drenched? To give up and to give way to what happens to you? To not care about safety when it is pouring after all?

And what happens when you’re drenched enough, when there is no way out of the shower, when you find yourself stuck in the middle of it alone?

Like the bird, you begin dancing.

I have changed cities countless times now. I have rented places and uprooted my existence for a little over four. I have pushed doors and flung them open with a backpack and a few suitcases in my hand. Eventually, when my life got heavier with more things to carry and even more to remember, I hired the movers to help me out.

Slowly, I have watched empty rooms take shape and fill with little trinkets and things that make it all a home. I have learned where things were, where they were meant to be, and, more importantly, where they felt right. I have had places where books were on a desk, on a shelf, in a corner, or on the counter. I have slept more on couches and rugs than on beds, and I have spilt coffee on all three occasionally. I have spent drunken nights both in and out, dazed, confused and lost in a delirium I cannot make sense of clearly still. I have learned to do the dishes, cook the little I can cook, clean ardently and regularly, take care of myself when I’m sick, and discipline myself when needed. In many ways, I have done it all alone.

And this was my worst fear growing up—doing it all alone—and so I craved love, and I begged for it, and I wanted us to build a home of our own, and there you were, and there I was and yet, I seem to have missed it all.

There is so much to learn about life still, but I have learned most of how to build a life, build a home, and I have done it by myself, and I don’t see how that will change anymore. And sure, I will let you bring things to the table, but the table will already be there, and it will already be set. I’ll clean the house a certain way, and I’ll have my lists and my todos and places where things will already be kept.

When I meet you, if I meet you, I will already have a place of my own. I can’t wait for you to ask to change the curtains because grey is a bit dull or add more plants because nine is still not enough, but before all of that happens, before we spend afternoons baking and making a mess of the kitchen floor, or slow dancing in the bedroom with the lights out, I will hesitate because you see, love, I’ve spent so many years building homes by myself, I never quite learned to share the key.

How do I keep writing? How do I keep living? There may be a reason. I do not know which one since the reasons keep coming and going. No writer writes for one reason alone. He keeps writing until he can hang onto something else, and time passes. People live for different things in different years, too. No one lives for one reason. The reasons will continually change. It is the living that continues. It is the writing that goes on.

I have lived to wait for certain happiness and written to pass the time. When the wait was over, I got a desk and put it in the space created inadvertently in the corner of the room. I began writing. There was a semblance of happiness in all this, albeit not the one I had waited for. It seemed like the only good use for the corner of my heart. I have written every day since. Many live to forget and write to imagine things that never happened—as a proxy, overwriting what happened. They highlight the good, inflate it and make it larger; they forget to capture the elementary detail about the bad or omit it entirely.

Perhaps, the better questions are: why do you write now, at this moment, and why do you keep living? I believe it is a question I have asked myself one too many times recently. It is a question I have asked many others as well. Take the last evening: I sat sharing a stack of banana pancakes with a friend on a Monday evening, and with my mouth stuffed, I asked him, “Well, you know how it always is; what do I do now that I am happy?” He said nothing, but the answer was right there.

You live. You continue getting delectable pancakes with your friends, you look at the rain and wait for it ardently, and when it arrives, you scurry back into the house in an irony nature does not quite understand. You continue laughing and, if life demands, crying. There always has been so much more than our collective pursuit of individual happiness. You go through the motions, contribute to the world, and see what time has in store.

Sometimes, if you’re like me with a desk in the corner, you must sit down and write about everything. I write because I don’t know any other way to live; I live because what else is there to do anyway?

People are so concerned with how the world ends, what happens when it does, will an asteroid crash into the planet as it has before, will it be ice or will it be fire, or will it be something unprecedented, unimagined, unthought as if any of it will matter? The world will most likely not end in their time, so most of it is not their concern. And if it happens in their time, it will not matter, for no one will be left to remember it. The only concern anyone should have for the world is what they do when living in it. The world ending is far too great an ordeal for a singular member of one out of the millions of species on this planet. Our only concern should be: how do I live now that I am here?

Most people talk about the end of the world, not because of scientific curiosity or some saviour complex, those who have any or both of the two are already in the right places trying to predict and understand it all, but only because it is simply easier to think no one will remember them for no one will be left to remember them. By extension, the little they did do or, in most cases, the most they left undone with the time they had here will never be recalled, never be tallied, never be thought of and considered. It is easier to think an archive of your life will be wholly lost and entirely obliterated than to accept you will remain. You will remain in the memory of others, you will remain with all your flaws and some of your virtues, you will remain until everyone you ever knew, everyone they ever mentioned your existence to, and everyone who was affected by it was gone, and all that you touched, that touched something else, which did something else in return will be destroyed. You will remain forever—what a dreaded thought. It is much easier to tell each other the world is ending soon. It is the only way so many of us can manage some sleep at night.

Yet, the world is here, and tomorrow arrives before we open our eyes. What a splendid opportunity to do better. There is no other question greater than this: how do I be better while the world still spins?

Last evening, I sat on my chair, spinning in happiness, one thought circling in my head: I am happy, I am happy, I am happy. It has taken me a lot of time to get here. There was no reason for me to be as ecstatic. It was a normal day in a normal life, but I found myself exhilarated about this normalcy. I thought about walking in the city, of all the times I had walked in the streets of this town, and it gave me an inebriation I had not experienced in the strongest of booze I have had yet. Oh, to be drunk on happiness. There is no drink so potent, no drug as strong. Why was I happy? Maybe, it was the sudden realisation of my worth. And why did I know my worth? Because I knew the extent of the happiness I could feel.

I thought of time, how fast it has passed and how slow the weeks have felt still. I thought of this contradiction and how everyone before me has experienced it. Perhaps, time did flow only towards the future and only forward. Maybe, that much was true, but it did not flow constantly. Some moments slowed it, and others rushed it. And these moments were different for all people. Our clocks and calendars were but a soft proxy for the lived experience of time. I thought of how each day feels like a year in itself now. No, not because of some impossibility or heaviness, but only how open my eyes are and how my heart takes it all in. I thought of the good I had managed to do with my days amidst the relentless chaos.

The music went on and on, and I sat there, laughing, smiling. I wanted to share this feeling with the entire world and, if possible, send it out into outer space for those who may stumble upon it perchance. I tried writing about it, but all I wanted to do was sit in it, to sit on the chair, and so, I mustered only a sentence: in my happiness, I ardently wait for what the future holds. There is so much that is yet to happen. There is so much time still. There are so many days waiting to be experienced. I cannot wait to see what this life hands me next—even if it is a cup of coffee. And what if nothing happens? Then, nothing it shall be. And even that will not take this joy away from me.

Sometime early last year, I ate some cereal late at night while watching a movie, relishing in a juvenile mutiny against all norms. In any case, in my delinquency, I kept the ceramic bowl right near my feet. Tired and a little out of my wits, I knocked it over when I got off the rug. The bowl shattered into about five or six pieces—small and big. I collected all of them and sat to research how best to repair ceramic bowls. At that moment, I believed I could fix anything with the right tools and suitable adhesive.

I got a box of epoxy resin, a trustworthy solution. I mixed the epoxy and began to attach the pieces together. I became ecstatic to see the bowl get back into shape. I left it to dry and settle for two days and seven hours. I have always taken pride in my patience. Upon preliminary inspection, the bowl seemed good as new. There were a few cracks and some resin I had to wipe off, but it was a bowl, ready to be used again. Yet when I poured some water into it to check, it fell apart. All the pieces came off in my hands. Disappointed, I shoved the pieces into a box and kept it in the cupboard above the kitchen sink.

The next day, I tried some super glue, and slowly, my worst fear came true. The pieces were too thin and broken in the wrong places; the resin had made it all worse. My desperate attempts only made a mess of what was left. Eventually, I shoved all the pieces, now full of leftover glue and resin, into the box again; I forgot all about the bowl. The other day, I saw a box in the cupboard above the kitchen sink. Immediately, I emptied it into the bin.

I often tell people we learn everything twice. When life has to teach you something, and life has something to teach most of us, it does not start with the large things. It takes the smaller things away, simpler things, like a bowl. Only when we don’t listen does the happiness leave, and the love evaporates. What was the lesson, you ask? “Sometimes, some things are too broken to be fixed.”

And yet, almost over a year later, as I recall it all, I can’t help but wonder: how would we know for certain till we tried?

Do I write for a living? It depends on how you define a living. When my feet hurt from walking away from all the pain in my heart, when it persists still, can I get a balm or a bandage in exchange for these words? Probably not. But I still can write the pain away. And what of the balm and the bandage? I can do something with the time I have after to manage to get them, too. Anyone who tells a writer, or any artist for that matter, to live a life, so bohemian, so out of touch that they fail to be a part of the world they continually add beauty to does not understand that art is reflective—what you put in is what you get. To be an artist had two parts to it, and both were of equal importance. The first was to live in a way that you saw nothing but beauty around—in the birds zooming on an afternoon, in your straggling sadness, in the little joke your friend tells and laughs, in the smile of someone you have not seen for years. The second was to take it as if it were clay and to make something out of it, something tangible, something that others could experience.

What does it mean to be in touch with society? It means to give the cliche of the starving artist up, to live in the same ways as the others, to let go of the ever-so-obvious artistic pride and being different. An artist who lives outside society has no right to make commentary on it. It is those who sit at the same tables, stand in the same queues, watch films in the same theatres, drink at the same bars who have any authority to talk about the others, talk about how they should live and what they should do. One must live among the people with goals and aspirations not entirely unlike the regular person to talk about them. Artistic pride is misplaced; it should be in those who belong to the world, not those who reject it; it should be in those who embrace the world with open arms and welcome it with all the love they can muster.

When someone truly lives in the world, when they walk the same streets as everyone else and get their shoes soiled regularly, they realise they don’t have the time to sit and snark about philosophy and art—they have work to do and bills to pay and forms to fill and cabs to hail.

They could break my heart and all my bones, and I would still love people, in general, with all their trivialities and futilities. I will do it not because of what they do but only because of who I am. And if I am often angry at the state of the world, even if ever-so-slightly, or at how people do things, it is because I know all of us, myself included, could be so much more. I do not know if there are other worlds and whether I am someone else in them. But here, in this one, it is my only purpose: to love, to love and to love, to forgive endlessly, to only look at the best in people, and to beg and plead for us to be better, hoping someone listens.

And for this very reason, I had a muse in all people I met. If there was a secret to my writing, not that there is one that is warranted for these words are nothing special on their own, it’s that there are always people around me, and I often steal a thought or two. And because of that, I will always have something to write. I will always have something to say because people always have something to say. They often tell writers to find time to sit and write at a particular time of day, to make a ritual, to find the muse there, but it’s not always like that. The muse is not some legendary fairy; it is but a reliable assistant. Even if you don’t pay attention, it silently scribbles notes into its trusty notepad. It walks with you like your shadow, and then, when you sit down to write, it reminds of you things you did not even watch properly.

That is the secret I have uncovered over these few months. This is what I have learned about myself in this changing of seasons. Other people are an irrevocable part of who I am, and it will always be this way. Till the day I am writing, I will need others around, and as long as there are others around, I will be able to write. And in this loop, I shall live my life until the end of my days, and caught in this loop, I shall remain a writer.

The more you look around, the more you see hyperawareness and obliviousness alike. Everyone knows and cares so much about what’s happening in another state, another country; I believe, in due time, they will be in the loop with the day-to-day on Mars. But, if you ask them: how do you feel in this moment right now? They won’t have an answer or enough articulation to try to reach it. Unable to quote a news headline to justify their views and unable to rely on some sordid humour or a popular joke to suggest their disposition, they’ll sit there, dumbfounded. Within a few seconds of this paralysis, they will grow weary and irritated. Then, they will ask you not to bother them with such questions and trivialities when so much of so much more importance is going on in the world. All that, or their answer will be “okay”, as if they know what that means.

We are bombarded with such an unimaginable plethora of information, false and true alike, that our brains short-circuit and fry out. Then, slowly we lose control and watch as every ounce of individual agency is squeezed out of us. In a world with constant influx of information, tuning it out is rebellion. Tuning it all out is how you survive in a world where the voices don’t stop, and the pictures don’t stop moving.

But none of it can begin if you don’t take back your agency from those who use the lack of it to take something more valuable than a few dollars from you. They take your ability to answer the single, most important question known to mankind. The question is probably why we even have language in the first place; the question warrants only the most honest answer: how do you feel?

Human beings are the only animals who rarely feel just okay. We feel cold and bitter; warm and cosy; ecstatic and elated; distraught and broken; uncomfortable, insulted, furious, and enraged; bored, blasé and spiritless; tranquil, peaceful, and restful; inspired, inventive and creative. We feel glorious; we feel spectacular.

All this information has robbed us of all we can feel. We are all just okay as we go about our days; the loudness of all that information is jarring, and none of us stops to say: I am exhausted.

There is so much anger in me, but I do not know how to let it out. When I was young, someone told me I was too angry, that anger was to be hidden, that it was ugly and unwarranted. They said I should be more patient. I began to temper my anger. I rubbed and smoothed the coarse surface and sharp edges, blunted everything that was a hazard, and polished it all. It took me years, of course, and it leaked here and there for a while.

Now, when I’m angry, I have a few words to spew, but beyond that, there is only a sigh if I can muster it, and if not, all I have is silence. Where does it all go? It all stays with me. I remember all instances where I wanted to flatten the Earth with my rage, and I remember how I tucked it behind a smile. Now, almost like a matchstick that won’t light up no matter how hard you strike it, I cannot exhibit true anger. I seem to have lost it.

Sometimes, I wish I lost this patience, regardless of how difficult it was to acquire it all. On some days, it does not feel like virtue, this patience of mine. I often wonder what would happen if I were granted my wish? If I lost my wits and my temper in the most catastrophic, cataclysmic, destructive way? It is but desire, after all. As much as I wish it, nothing happens. I shake my head and tell myself to stand down, hold back, and stay the blade of my words. I know nothing but to hold back; only, I often wish someone was as patient with me, sometimes.

That is the curse with any virtue in this human condition: you acquire it at great personal cost, only to watch the world run just fine without it. In your mind, you think, you know, your way is the correct way. But no one else seems to think so; no one else cares about virtue when explosions are so easy, and lying is so natural. And so, honest people are tricked the most and continue staying honest, and patient ones, like me, rarely receive the restraint they so freely grant the others.

And they die knowing they were virtuous as if that means anything at all. That is all virtue is ever good for: not for an easier life but for a peaceful death. The world goes on just fine with or without it.

In life, you can choose to be the builder, the worker, someone who takes the pieces and puts them together. You can sketch plans and blueprints. You can burn the midnight oil drowning in books—heavy for children and adults alike. You can build your life up to code, down to the last detail. The result is a sturdy, robust life, bulwarked on all ends. It’s a life that is not shaken up quickly—a strong foundation, a stronger building. Many have done this and done great things. This life is of sense, pattern, and structure. But even the most efficient worker, who does not need a blueprint, visualises the result to build it as expected. It’s a life of looking ahead, imagining and seeing the building before it stands. It’s a life of relentless planning.

Then, there is the other way. You can choose to be the artist, observing from the outside. Your life will never really be yours. You would always be on the sidelines of your own breath, your exhalations flowing about in the crowded cities. It is the life of instinct. You will have to develop a knack for trusting your gut with good reason. It is a life that will always be in flux. You will not get a handle on it because when life imitates art, it imitates it entirely. No great work of art is about knowing what shows up on the blank page. It is all about the serendipity, what the muse wants, and what the medium permits. When you live this way, you will meet life halfway; it will demand you to find some answers; there will be no code, only suggestion. It will be a life of trial and error; trust me, there will be a lot of error.

There is no correct choice, but the moment you pick one, you will regret not picking the other. However, there is a trick no one tells you: choose none. You are free to shift from one to the other on a whim; you can even do it within the day. Many have done it; some even succeeded. There can be art in structure, for what else is mathematics? And there can be structure in art, for what else is a symphony?

It will be lonely, but if we meet along the way, do wave a hello. We shall share the rarest camaraderie known to humankind. We will set up camp and laugh about the merry pleasures of being lost.

Nothing makes what you’re feeling real until someone asks, “Are you okay?” Three simple words and a wave crashes inside you and breaks the hardest rocks of faux resilience apart, into pieces, into tiny shards of “No, no, no, no…” It also saves you, for the mind is not a rock; it’s an ocean, and the water has to pass somehow. What do you think is more resilient—the rocks that break apart, eventually, or the water that is always there, that slowly chips away at everything? Thus, the water does pass—you sit there crying over your friend’s shoulder as they sit with baffled bewilderment in their eyes, saying, “I’m sorry, I did not know.”

Nothing makes your happiness valid until someone asks on a muggy summer day, “So, how have you been?” And you tell them, “Happy, I’ve been happy,” with the glint of the yellow sun sparkling in the corner of your brown eyes as the drops of water trickle along the frosty glasses. You beam and laugh about it all as the music never ends, as the beer keeps pouring, as the days keep stacking, one after the other. There is nothing but days overflowing with all sorts of abundance. It is not until someone asks that you lose yourself in the daze of those happy summer days. It is not until someone asks that you even know, that you even realise how bright the days have been.

And that is why we needed the others—to ask and chink the dam slowly starting to crack as if their question was the final nudge that broke the whole thing apart. And that is why we needed the others—to ask and force us to look around at how the scenery has changed, at how plentiful everything has been. We needed the others to ask us questions. The questions make things real. All else is a blur of time. It is the questions that checkpoint our lives; it is the questions that tell us something has to change; it is the questions that remind us to savour things.

Nothing makes life more apparent than a harmless question, perhaps, asked in passing or as casual conversation or small talk at the bus stop. Nothing else makes life true but the existence of those who ask us things. We only exist because someone asks us, “How was your day?”

I woke up at eight and decided to sleep more since it was raining outside. I drew the curtain open to see the drops fall until I dozed off again. When I woke up, it was still raining. There is peace in days like this, when the morning hour never turns to afternoon, when it feels like it is eight in the morning even when it is, in fact, much later in the day. Perhaps, that is all we want, for the world to be an eternal fresh start, a never-ending morning. It is when days end when we sit and think about how we fared, that we stop to ponder over an unnecessary cross word three years ago or how an argument could have been avoided today. To be rocked softly in the cradle of the morning, lost halfway in grogginess and comfort is what people wanted. It is why we loved days when it began raining before we woke up and kept raining till we slept.

In the few hours I stole from the day ahead, which would inevitably turn it into a scrambling nightmare, I dreamt about many people I had not remembered for a while. It was comforting to not only see them but talk to them, to laugh with them. It baffles me how we know so much about the skies above, a little less about the oceans below, but nothing significant about this realm inside our heads. I do not mean to learn about dreams in some mystical babbling, which amounts to nothing but some things people say to each other. There is little difference between that and how an academic or a critic interprets writing. Nobody but the writer knows what the words mean, and no one but a dreamer can explain, if at all, what the dreams suggest.

And so, when I woke up, I did it with a hapless curiosity. I imagined a world where we understand the chemistry of dreams like we understand the chemistry of table salt, and comprehend the biology of dreams like we comprehend the biology of how wounds heal, and know the physics of dreams like we know the atom. All that is to say, a world where it is common knowledge and almost indisputable. Until then, our dreams were only a place to escape into, which, now that I think of it, is not half bad a bargain. Sometimes, that is all we need: a meaningless solution to reality, the root of all our problems.

When I talk to them, most people don’t interest me simply because they are too proud. They are too proud of some language, a country, a faith, and in this pride, which they dub culture, they fail to see the big picture; they fail to imagine how none of this exists. Identity, at least in the regard people look at it, is either luck or choice. A red rose has no religion, and a yellow rose does not speak a foreign language. Both of them bloom. And often, they bloom around each other if given a chance. A group has culture; an individual has identity. A person who substitutes one for another is not attractive, only a copy of a copy. You may change your culture with a snap. It is not difficult; in fact, it is only most necessary. No, not for a better world or other hubris that thinkers spew, but because what a sight it would be, how glorious!

It would be refreshing for people to have ideas of their own, to think and explore and to question and doubt everything they are handed by the group.

Doubt goes both ways. People think it is heresy to doubt; it is only heresy when you doubt and fail to see the facts in front of you, regardless of whether they help you converge or diverge into the collective. A child must drop a ball to see that gravity works; irrespective of if it works, it is the dropping of the ball that is important. What a blessing we can think for ourselves; what a tragedy that most people don’t. They live identically to most that came before, not an ounce of it original or new. All for the ease of not having to think. I am not interested in saving the world or changing it for good, but I am interested in what we can do when all of us think for ourselves. The beauty of our differences makes me pause in awe, in astonishment.

My need to reject culture, or at least to not accept the culture I’ve been handed word for word, comes from a long time ago when I met someone who asked me, “what do you see when you look up at the stars?” Thinking it was some rambling about god, I said, “I don’t know; what do you see?” “I see fire,” they said, “so much of the universe is continually burning, and we are still here. That has to count for something, doesn’t it?”